A Measure of Seychelles 'InfoState' |18 January 2006

 Economies that have leveraged ICT infrastructure are today reaping its benefits in terms of economic growth and development. 

ORBICOM, an international network of Unesco and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has published a book entitled From the Digital Divide to Digital Opportunities which is a response to the plan of action set up at the first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) summit in 2003.  The summit called for the launching and the development of a "Composite ICT Development Index."  The aim of such a Composite ICT Development Index was to measure the progress in term of ICT development between and within economies.  It also provides economies with a much-needed tool to measure and monitor the digital divide between the ICT have and have-not, which is now the relative difference in "infostate" between economies. It also allows economies to measure their progress over time in relation to other countries as well as to the world average. Such benchmarking and international comparisons are important to assess their progress objectively and help them set out realistic targets.

Composite ICT Development Index is based on the infostate conceptual framework relating ICT to the economic development and of a country’s productive capacity and use of ICT.  The framework is an aggregation between two entities:
 -The Info-use which refers to the uptake and usage of ICT and their intensity of use by businesses, organisations and households.

-The Info-density which refers to the stock of ICT capital and ICT Labour and skills including ICT infrastructure/network, machinery, equipment all of which are indicative of a country’s productive capacity. 

Seychelles ICT performance has grown and is continuing to show significant growth.  With the further liberalisation of the sector last year, it is anticipated that growth in the telecommunication sector will continue.  Note that over the last eight years, the number of players in the sector has grown from only one telecommunication service provider to five to date, namely Cable and Wireless Seychelles (CWS), Telecom Seychelles Limited (TSL), Atlas, Kokonet and Intelvision. 

Seychelles' level of ICT uptake, according to the publication, has an index value of 141.7 and is above the average value of 116.4, thus ranking it 48th amongst 149 economies.  The publication also reveals that countries with high infostate have well developed and established networks. In this context, Seychelles has a fixed telephone network connecting over 65% of households and a cable network that has reached most parts of Mahé.  The mobile services are accessible to over 98% of the population.  This segment of ICT, over the years has shown strong growth. In 1997 there were 2,549 mobile subscribers compared to 54,368 today, translating to more than 67% of the population has a mobile phone. 

Seychelles ICT infrastructure is ahead of all the African nations (included in the survey) with an index value of 3.5 in 1995 to 84.3 in 2003 according to the publication. Some of the indicators used to determine the network index evolution are main telephone waiting lines and the level of digital to analogue lines, mobile subscription, cable connection and Internet international bandwidth to name a few. 

The use of ICT grew significantly over the period 1995-2003 with the info-use index increasing from 37.7 in 1995 to 126.6 in 2003. The level of info use is all attributed to different factors such as the liberalisation of the sector, changes that have taken place in the regulatory framework, the effect of taxation and Government policies have directly or indirectly contributed to a reduction in tariffs thus, encouraging more customers to increase their ICT usage and investment in the telecommunication sector. 

The plans of the two mobile operators to upgrade their networks to allow for provision of more advanced services and recent reduction in tariffs will contribute significantly towards socio-economic growth, for one cannot ignore the strong relationship between ICT and economic growth and general development of the country.

Contributed by DITC